Systems for storing and providing business data may model the data using logical entities such as dimensions and measures. Dimensions represent sets of values along which an analysis may be performed or a report may be generated (e.g., Country, Year, Product), and measures are indicators, most often numeric, whose values can be determined for a given combination of dimension values. For example, a Sales measure may be used to determine the total sales for January (i.e., a value of the Month dimension) in France (i.e., a value of the Country dimension).
Measures may be used in formulas, in conditions, and in any navigation state of a query. Types of measures may include “basic” measures, “restricted” measures (i.e., measures filtered by one or more dimension values), and “calculated” measures (i.e., measures defined by a formula, which may include one or more measures, constants and operators).